It is no longer possible to deny that in the land of Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights we have differential policing and justice. The law is no longer blind, and now treats criminals differently depending on their religious beliefs, ethnicity and sexuality.

The sentencing guidelines published last week explicitly instruct judges that a pre-sentence report “will normally be considered necessary” if a perpetrator of a crime is “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority and/or faith minority community”, female, transgender, or a drug addict, or a victim of modern slavery, trafficking or exploitation.

Pre-sentence reports are used by courts to find mitigating circumstances that can lead judges to avoid custodial sentences, and impose suspended sentences and community punishments instead.
And these guidelines are clear: minorities should receive lesser punishments than white people, especially white men. The provisions about slavery, trafficking and exploitation are an invitation for lawyers to help illegal immigrants to escape the reach of the law.

This is not the first official direction to tell judges to put identity politics before the once-sacred principle of equality before the law. Last July, the Judicial College published the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which quotes approvingly a US Supreme Court judge saying, “in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently”.
Putting this principle into practice, the Bench Book warns for example that “the family impact of custodial sentences [is] particularly acute for black mothers” because black families are more likely to have lone parents.

For women who wear the burqa, the Bench Book says it is a “balancing exercise” to determine whether a judge can ask that the veil should be removed. It says, “the identity of a defendant can be established in private without requiring removal” and it expresses scepticism about “deciding credibility from the appearance and demeanour” of a witness or defendant.

The Bench Book has a whole section on “Islamophobia”, a concocted concept eliding ideas of blasphemy and criticism of individual Muslims with racism. And it endorses statements by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), as well as the definition of Islamophobia produced in a report by a cross-party group of MPs.

Read more: Race should play no role in justice but shamefully in Britain it now does